The invention relates to a commissioning system comprising at least one central conveyor, in particular a central belt, for receiving products to be taken from a storage means by commissioners and to be assembled according to an order, and a conveying installation to move away in collecting containers the products transferred at a transfer site at the end of the central conveyor.
The storing of a large number of products in wholesale, and the commissioning of various products according to an order is a problem which typcially occurs particularly in pharmaceutical wholesale, but also in the delivery of sound carriers (cf. DE 42 25 041 A). Orders are filled several times per day. The assembly and delivery of the products required should be effected as quickly as possible after the respective order has been received. To this end, also commissioning machines are frequently used (cf. e.g. EP 592 729 A); the latter do quickly and reliably put together the ordered products, yet they are comparatively expensive to buy, and, as a rule, they can only be used for certain products. In most instances, commissioning machines must be refilled manually and require a careful maintenance and service. An important element of a commissioning machine is the ejector which ejects a product from a stack. A malfunction at one ejector thus may block the entire course of commissioning.
With manual commissioning, such a malfunction cannot occur. With manual commissioning, usually each commissioner completely fills an order according to an order list or document, the type and number of pieces of products per order being largely variable, i.e. the commissioners are irregularly employed (unproductive time), which is detrimental from an economic point of view.
From DE 41 04 527 A and EP 282 785 A furthermore commissioning installations for items are known in which the items, e.g. medicaments, are stored in a paternoster shelf and from there are manually removed according to the commissioning orders and deposited in selected, tiltable intermediate storage containers, from where they are automatically transfered into transport containers passed by therebelow on a conveyor belt, when the order has been finished. Yet, due to the paternoster shelf, on the one hand, as well as to the transfer of the items directly into the transport containers, on the other hand, storage, and in particular also the commissioning possibilities, and above all the speed of commissioning or handling, is limited.